Venice ’25: Newport & the Great Folk Dream

It was home to stately mansions, like Seaview Terrace (used for exterior shots on Dark Shadows). However, in 1954 the Rhode Island city started attracting hip young visitors when it first hosted the Newport Jazz Festival. George Wein’s Festival Productions diversified with the Newport Folk Festival, which was even less elitist than the jazz festival—or so you would think. The folkies were decidedly lefty in their politics, but some had very strict notions as to what constituted proper folk music—and you’d better believe it was acoustic. This musical bias would be sorely tested in the early 1960s. As it happened, documentarian Murray Lerner shot a wealth of footage of the 1963-1966 Newport Folk Festivals, out of which only a fraction was seen in his film simply titled Festival. Highlights from that unseen treasure trove finally see the light of day in Robert Gordon’s Newport & the Great Folk Dream, which premiered at this year’s Venice Film Festival.

If you know anything about Bob Dylan, you know the film is building up to the fireworks of the 1965 fest, when Dylan “went electric.” Lerner also produced a later documentary about that pivotal moment. In the early years, most of the angst focused on politics, particularly the Civil Rights Movement. In fact, the Newport Folk Festival offered a rare opportunity for social and cultural interaction between white hill country musicians and black blues and gospel artists.

Wisely, one of the primary [disembodied] interview voices is the of Joe Boyd (author of White Bicycles), who was Wein’s blues producer. He fondly remembers walking through the so-called “Blues House,” where the likes of Skip James and Son House performing informally in each room. Yet, he also hints at the Festival’s deep ideological divide when he recalls board members Alan Lomax and Theodore Bikel would be periodically act scandalized by the professional-grade sound-checks he provided for the performers, because it clashed with their paternalistic, noble-savage-idealizing conception of folk music.

Indeed, it is fascinating to see the kind of authenticity debate in folk that somewhat parallels criticism of Wynton Marsalis’s jazz gate-keeping in the 1990s, except the folk purists were probably more vehement. Regardless, the stacked line-up of blues legends truly blows the mind: James, House, Mississippi John Hurt, Jesse Fuller, John Lee Hooker, Fred & Annie McDowell, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and (controversially at the time) the Paul Butterfield Blues Band (because they were “electric”).

White Bicycles

White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s
By Joe Boyd
Serpent’s Tail
1-85242-910-0

One of the virtues of 1960’s was that it seemed to be an easier time for music to cross-over categorical boundaries. Joe Boyd’s White Bicycles is a valentine to the years when blues, jazz, and folk could share a place in the public consciousness with rock and pop.

Boyd would have his greatest success producing folk-rock and psychedelic bands in London, but he started in the business with the blues. For his first foray into concert promotion was as a teenager in New Jersey. Boyd found the temporarily forgotten bluesman Lonnie Johnson and enticed him to give a concert in a friend’s living room. As Boyd recalls:

“As the evening went on and everyone relaxed, the music grew more intense and Lonnie began playing his old blues. Our friends and their parents edged closer to Lonnie’s chair in the middle of the room; none of them had ever heard anything like it.” (p. 15)

Boyd would first his first real professional work in the blues field as well, managing George Wein’s Blues and Gospel Caravan European tour, featuring artists like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Muddy Waters, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, and Reverend Gary Davis. Boyd frequently worked for Wein’s Festival Productions, coordinating jazz tours as well. While his own company primarily handled rock-oriented acts, he returned to jazz to record South African Chris McGregor, with countrymen Johnny Dyani and Dudu Pukwana. It is these reminiscences that will be of most interest to jazz and blues listeners.

Boyd however, became intimately involved with the London rock scene as the decade advanced. As a producer and record label owner he pursued but just missed out on major acts like Pink Floyd and ABBA. Throughout Bicycles Boyd consistently defends the music, culture, and leftist politics of the sixties. At times though, he does express some reservations about decade, particularly in regards to the drug use which would ultimately claim so many musicians. Boyd writes:

“Is this one legacy of the sixties? That after flinging open the doors to a world previously known only at the margins of society, the pioneers would move on, leaving the masses to add drugs to the myriad forces pulling our society towards chaos and mediocrity?” (p. 267)

To his credit, Boyd writes with a great deal of candor. He pulls no punches when suggesting the band members’ conversion to Scientology led to the artistic demise of the Incredible String Band. While some of the figures and events of White Bicycles may not ultimately be remembered as mythically as Boyd views them, he makes a passionate case for his music.